Rarely a month goes by without a report of a plane crash somewhere in the world. Typically, once terrorism has been ruled out as the cause, the mistakes of pilots, ground crews or other aviation personnel will be blamed. A list of the accidents reads like a catalog of human errors.
Ergonomists take the line that it is a catalog of effects, not causes, and that accidents will continue until the habit of looking beyond errors for root causes takes hold.
On Sunday August 27 a Comair CRJ-100 burst into flames in Lexington, Kentucky, killing 49 of the 50 people on board. Looking for the lessons in the accident in an interview with The Ergonomics Report
This article originally appeared in The Ergonomics Report™ on 2006-08-30.